son and heir #7: multi-factor authentication
Henry V was born in Monmouth, Wales, maybe in August, probably in September, maybe in 1387, most likely in 1386. We know him imperfectly, through chronicles written by monks who knew someone who knew someone who was there, through parliamentary proceedings drawn up by anonymous clerks, through flattering poetry in a form of English so foreign to Anglophones now that it must be learned as if a new language; through six hundred years of reinterpretation by artists, historians, royals, politicians, admirers, critics, each with their own whole and secret lives. We know the endlessly multiplying versions of Henry spawned by Shakespeare’s history plays, which are at least slightly different each time they are performed.
Shakespeare himself was writing at a distance of two hundred years, working from Holinshed’s Chronicles, stealing unabashedly from The Famous Victories of Henry V (imagine what modern literature would be like if we were allowed to rewrite other authors’ recent novels). There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare had any particular interest in accurately rendering the past. Shakespeare’s Henry does not speak as Shakespeare imagined the real Henry V must have spoken. There are no stage directions demanding authenticity of costume or set dressing. The ‘tavern world’ of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 is entirely anachronistic; Prince Hal escapes the strictures of late medieval monarchy by slipping into the milieu of the Elizabethan middle class.
When I took creative writing classes in college, there was an overwhelming sense that the only worthwhile story was a semi-autobiographical one, written in prose either crisp and workmanlike or carefully lyrical. This was never verbalized, just suggested through praise and criticism, through the choice of readings (I was assigned Lorrie Moore’s ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ in three different classes by three different professors over the course of three years). A classmate’s first workshop story, funny and energetic, was derided for being too much like the movies; the second, more obviously autobiographical one was praised, despite its sentimentality, for getting closer to the truth. The constant reminders not to conflate the writer with the protagonist were only necessary because the protagonists so often were just like the writer. To write something ‘real’ was to write about yourself and pretend you were not writing about yourself. To write about any person but yourself, in any place but the place to which you belonged, in any time but the one in which you were living, was to write something false.
Now I am a little older. Now autofiction — which its adherents have positioned as the most intellectually, formally and morally rigorous mode in which a contemporary author might work — satisfies the reader’s contradictory desires for the total collapse of author and character, and for the ability to forestall any judgment of the author/character with the excuse that the text is nothing more than the text, a trick, a joke at the expense of anyone who takes it too seriously. Fiction-fiction is embarrassing because it asks you to believe: to have faith in the truth of it, even though all of the evidence available to you seems to prove it false. ‘You can’t believe things because they're a lovely idea,’ Charles Ryder complains (that is a quotation from the 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, who, when he lived in Golders Green, used to walk to a distant postbox so that his letters would be stamped with a more fashionable postcode).
Readers cope with the danger and vulgarity of fiction by demanding authenticity, a clear concordance between the material facts of an author’s life and those of the protagonist. If an Other is observed, this must be done through the consciousness of an author-avatar: it was terribly gauche for Alan Hollinghurst to write from the perspective of aristocrats in The Swimming-Pool Library, but thankfully by The Line of Beauty he learned to follow Waugh's example and write a middle-class protagonist who is allowed only temporarily into the world of the elite. In liberals, the demand for authenticity comes either from the desire to have one’s self-concept validated, or from the desire to consume the essence of the oppressed other, and in doing so absorb some of the virtue one fears one lacks. In conservatives, the demand simply reflects the need to make sure that everyone knows their place. Conservatives are very much willing to consume the work of their inferiors, so long as the creators avoid seeming to claim they are anything but what they are.
We are all so boring, so jaded and tired. In a world where the most ludicrous conspiracies are treated as fact, readers start a novel with the author’s biography, so that they can choose ahead of time whether or not they believe. The purpose of fiction now is to confirm what the reader has already decided is the truth.
I wonder if we would go back to Shakespeare and tell him to give up the Venetian aristocrat shit in favour of plays about an aspiring poet/playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon whose father was a glove-maker. Perhaps not: perhaps we would just continue to believe that Shakespeare could only have written well about power because he was the Earl of Oxford, or even Queen Elizabeth herself, who was reputed to have said, regarding Shakespeare’s Richard II, ‘I am Richard, know ye not that?’ Apparently Elizabeth said this to a man named William Lambarde — jurist, antiquarian, son of a nouveau-riche draper — who by 1601 had become Keeper of Records in the Tower of London. But any original document by Lambarde relating this conversation has been lost, leaving scholars to fight over whether the story is true, and if so how true, and what it really means. And even if such a document survived, would we believe Lambarde capable of recording the true words of the queen?
Lady Pansy Lamb, having been sent an Advance Reader Copy of Brideshead Revisited, wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘All the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world as you describe, or at any rate impinged on it. I was a debutante in 1922, & though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses, Norfolk House, Dorchester House, Grosvenor House & may have seen Julia Flyte. Yet, even in retrospect, it all seems very dull. Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich & owner of a wonderful home, though some were one or the other. You see English Society of the ‘20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs. I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is.’
Lamb, under her maiden name of Pakenham, was the author of two novels. I can’t find a copy of August for sale; I found one copy of the first edition of The Old Expedient available via a reseller for about €150. In 1981, Brideshead Revisited was adapted into a Granada miniseries starring Jeremy Irons, and ever since then has been the standard against which all depictions of the English aristocracy have been measured. Now Jeremy Irons owns a fifteenth-century castle in Cork. Now people take pictures in front of Castle Howard because it stood in for Brideshead Castle on TV. The epigraph of Waugh’s novel reads: ‘I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.’